Layout of documents, in particular electronic documents, can be problematic. For example, the inability to adapt document layouts to different display sizes is becoming a more and more critical problem, as the variety of new and differently sized display devices proliferates. The problem is also exacerbated, in a sense, by the rapidly increasing screen resolutions available on LCD displays. These displays make practical increasingly complex page layouts and graphical designs that come closer all the time to rivaling those that can be rendered on the printed page.
Good automatic layout is fundamentally hard. The problem is compounded for more complex layouts, such as, for example, directed graphs. Typically the layout designer is given a rectangular area with a specific aspect ratio to place such a graph, but if the typical graph is merely scaled in size to fit the area, it will likely be quite hard to read and there may be much white space around the nodes of the graph.